Agro-forestry is a process that incorporates strips of trees within a cropped farming system.

It's a practice that delivers a multitude of benefits, both for the farm and for nature.

David Wolfe farms runs a pioneering agroforestry organic farm in Suffolk called Wakelyns and is seeing incredible results.

My parents bought this bought the land here at Wakelyns in 1992. It’s 23 hectares to 53 acres. They bought it at a time when my dad, who’d been an agricultural scientist working for the Government was looking for a retirement project and this was it. At that point people were talking in the science and agricultural community about the possibility about formalised and structured agroforestry. At that point though, no-one had done it at any scale, or done any research on it. They started in 1994 to plant formalised strips of agroforestry and it’s been run like that since then. What we have here is possibly the most established diverse ally based agroforestry cropping system possibly in Europe, or beyond. It’s really interesting to look at and experience what they planted, because essentially this was a science experiment. What they planted was five or six different areas of agroforestry characterised by different ally spacings and different sorts of trees. 

Across the farm, what we have is lines of trees, running North to South which means that you get maximum amounts of sunshine in the alleys inbetween. They planted at 12, 15, 18 metre spacing alleys, but time has suggested it should those spacings should have been wider. In the different areas that they planted, they planted different types of trees. In one area was hazels in double hedges. We coppice them by cutting them right down to the bottom every seven years, but on a cycle.

Each year we cut down some of the hedge lines and what that gives us at the seven year point is lengths of hazel which are about 3 to 3.5 meters long, and a little thicker than a broom handle. The best of those are then used for traditional Suffolk hedge laying. We also sell them as a local craft product, and we sell thousands. As it happens they are our best and most lucrative farming product. Stick farming essentially. The remaining goes towards biomass and is chipped up and goes into our boiler to produce heat and hot water in an environmentally sustainable way. 

We also have an area that is characterised by seven or eight tree lines, each tree line being a couple of hundred metres long, characterised by fruit trees. In that area there there are probably forty different types. There are apples, pears, plumbs, quinces, cherries, some nuts and medlars. All provide a fantastic variety of interesting food and fruit products. That diversity gives us a very long season, it gives us a range of different flavours and fruits, and brings us good resistance to disease because we haven’t done that daft thing of planting fruit trees in an orchard, which is a disease opportunity. The best place to plant a fruit tree is in a forest and this is the closest you will get to planting a fruit tree in a forest.

When Amanda and I took over the farm after my parents death, we had a challenge with those fruit trees because they are very difficult operationally and financially to crop as a commercial entity. Between the tree lines we also grow cereals in the cropping alleys. Allowing for the trees, these are 9/10/12 metre wide strips of farmland and in-between the trees, we run the alleys on an organic rotation system. So these alleys are on a four year rotation. For two of those years we focus on fertility building with a lay that is made up of a grass, clover, chicory, mustard mix which during that time is fixing nitrogen, building up the soil carbon and so on. Then we have two years of cropping. This might be lentils, squash, hemp, rye or cereals in those cycles. 

Going back to the fruit, what we have done is to implement short food chains and enterprise stacking. Short food chains means the we no longer sell our flour, cherries or apples. What we now have is an onsite bakery and cooking team who make lovely bread and make pies. They are bringing all the produce together on the farm to add value, create employment, and produce delicious food right here, rather than try to sell the raw commodities which is financially unsustainable. As part of that our bakers Maizie and Henrietta are also part-time fruit pickers. They work intimately with the fruit trees, and will know when a particular tress’s fruit is becoming ripe and will then pick all of the fruit on it.

Depending what that tree it might be, they will also press apple juice and make cider or apple pies or chutney, so it’s a much more integrates system. The other aspect of that is enterprise stacking, they are a separate enterprise. They are not my business. They are a separate business that we are hosting which enables this farm to grow this wide variety of crops and environmental services. So short food chains and enterprise stacking allows us to use the organic agroforestry system in a much more holistic and productive way. 

Where that has got us to is to thinking about the land and its use in a quite different way. We are moving away from thinking about this as a just a place to grow food and thereby generate money, or even as a piece of land that might produce habitats, of sequester some carbon We are now moving towards seeing this piece of land as productive in a much wider range of ways. Yes it produces food, but also very much at its fundamentals, it includes how much carbon can we sequester, how much can we contribute towards fighting against climate change, how much can we improve the biodiversity, how much can reduce the amount of pollutions that comes from agriculture into our water courses, how much employment and education can we generate, how much mental health and wellbeing benefits can we provide. So simply just seeing the land as a commodity, to produce food at best, actually this land is becoming a much more interesting and vibrant source of a wider range of things. 

We are trying to show that there is a fundamentally different approach to how we use the land, how we value the various different outputs of the land, and how important we see those different outputs as being. One of the outputs here at Wakelyns is that we get a number of different visitors who are farmers or landowners of one sort or another, who are looking for inspiration and ideas. It’s always great to see to people come here, see the different approaches that we are implementing, who then go on and do their own version. This is not some kind of abandonment of producing food, or abandonment of producing environmental value, those things are our necessary goals. 

One of the enterprises that we have going on here for example is being run by Janine and her family. Janine lives locally and they are growing squash for us here. They have around 3,500 squash plants which they have nurtured from seed in the greenhouse, and they have put those into a couple of alleys which are now nearly ready to harvest. 



When you look at the wildlife here, you can get a little complacent because it’s all around you. You hear bird song and you see butterflies and insects all the time. People ask me if we have surveys of what it was like back in 1992 when my parents first started with some empty wheat fields, because we have surveys of what we have now. Sadly we do not have those historical records, but what I will say is that all you need to do is walk round and listen to the birds and look at the butterflies. Then go and stand in fields round about and tell me how many birds and butterflies, deer and hares you see in those fields. Frankly there are very few, and declining. We are delighted, we’ve had more title doves here than we can remember in previous years. That in itself makes it all worth while. 

Another example of a stacked enterprise here is Claire and Kitty who we are hosting. They are the Contemporary Hempory. It’s a first time for them, and it’s a first time for us. Essentially they want to ‘grow your own clothes’. What’s interesting is that this part of the country used to be one of the main hemp growing areas of the country. You get village names round here like Hempnell and Hempstead which show the significance of the old value of hemp around here. The area between eye and Beecles was identified as a major hemp growing area, and farmers at one point had to grow some hemp to make rope for the navy. We were confident that hemp would grow. We had to get a licence to grow it from the home office because of its similarity to cannabis. Claire and Kitty are growing this hemp into order to generate fibre, from which they want to make good quality designed clothes. They have promised me that they will have Wakelyns grown clothes on the catwalk at London Fashion Week within 5 years. They want to show that you can have good quality, sustainable, decent, nice clothes from a product grow right here in Suffolk. 

We are currently at the first stage, where they harvested it at the weekend. It’s now waiting to dry. It will then go into that put over there called a retting pit, where you soak it in water and then the fibrous layer around the stalks of the hemp comes off, and that then gives you your fibres for your rope, your sacks, or in this case, to make clothes. Each of our alleys are about 220 metres long by about 10 metres. In comparison to an average East Anglian field it’s tiny, but it gives us an opportunity to have a go and different kinds of crops. It it’s successful we can then see about persuading other farmers around here to let them extend their operation, and see they can wake a whole wardrobe rather than just a shirt. 

Recently I obtained DEFRA statistics that have been gathered from farms every year. What they found is that the average UK cereal farm, a farmer receives an income of £72,000, but of that only £2,700 was profit from agriculture. The rest is subsidy of one sort of another or diversification. So the farmer is actually earring very little from farming, and is entirely dependent on public subsidy. As soon as you understand that, the idea that farms can do other things, and not just narrowly generate a small amount of money for farmers, starts to become very attractive. 

You start to question the status quo. Along with, for example, the farm producing tonnes of wheat, but also question how much carbon is it sequestering, how little pollution is it putting into the river, how little diesel is it using, how many people are working there, how many people are visiting it, and how much wellbeing is going on. How much public access is going on. I think one of the problems of the last 80 or so years of farming is that it has become narrowly focused on one or two metrics that are of course very important, but they are by no means the be all and end all. Now we have a biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis and a mental crisis I think the land is a source of tackling a whole much bigger range of issues that face us than just narrowly food.